Meghan trolls Charles with ‘loaded’ accessory choice
The Duchess of Sussex has twice recently made, and shared on Instragram, a fashion choice with a message that is not exactly subtle.
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You’ll be pleased to know, I’m sure, that as interest rate pain sinks its savage little incisors into us all, Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex don’t seem to be feeling the pinch.
Forget being able to afford organic eggs; the Sussexes are really in a different spending bracket. You and I might have one of those handy Uniqlo puffer jackets; last week Meghan donned a $6000 Hèrmes one. You and I might get to stay in the best 3.5 stars money can buy on work trips; the Sussexes just, according to the Daily Mail, have spent the week bedding down in a $9900-a-night hotel suite with its own private lift during the Invictus Games.
And anniversary presents? Some people get only slightly mashed boxes of Lindt; others get bespoke jewellery that can simultaneously give Buckingham Palace a bit of an ol’ poke in the eye too.
Take the very nice gold ring that the Duchess wore during her time in Vancouver last week for the Invictus Games, a piece that is both beautiful - and carries with it something of a jab at King Charles.
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Specifically, the piece is an engraved signet ring from Mayfair’s Bentley & Skinner, which features the Sussexes’ joint royal monogram and which was, a source confirmed to People, an anniversary present from Harry last year.
There it was on Meghan’s right hand as she sat courtside at the wheelchair basketball and there it was again several days later, co-starring the Duchess’ Instagram story celebrating Valentine’s Day, filmed back with the couple’s children in Montecito.
Yes, the ring is quite lovely - but it is also a highly public and far-from-subtle reassertion of the Sussexes’ royal status years on from having been stripped of their patronages and honorary military titles, had their HRHs mothballed and had the Home Office remove their taxpayer-funded security.
Maybe the 43-year-old wore the ring because it represents her husband’s unerring love for her after months of speculation and whispers, whispers about their marriage. But symbolically speaking, it also happens to carry with it a certain charge, a certain loadedness that is hard to go past.
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For someone who espouses Gloria Steinem’s “linked not ranked” ethos, Meghan - and Harry too - really are hooked on reasserting their royal distinction every hot chance they get.
Like on Netflix stationery and their website and Instagram and at conferences and when travelling and when getting into the jam peddling game and…
Here we are, five long years after the Sussexes upped their designer sticks, consciously decided to exclude themselves from the royal narrative and tootled off to rusticate in California and - yet they never seem to miss an opportunity to remind us they are still royal.
The incongruity of them wanting to be both free agents, unbound by all that stuffy protocol business, and to still claim membership of the very same monarchy they couldn’t get away from fast enough when it suits them never seems to have outwardly caused them even a twinge of worry.
When they launched a new website last year it grandly proclaimed to be the online home of “The Office of The Duke and Duchess of Sussex”.
They have staged their own “royal” tours to Nigeria and Colombia. (There has been
speculation Ghana could be the next such jaunt.)
The Duchess’ new show might be called With Love, Meghan but the promotional material prominently features her title.
Perhaps the hardest to make sense of example is this one: The intellectual dissonance of them leaving full-time working HRH life so their children could grow up free of the repressive royal yoke and without being trotted out for PR purposes…Only for Harry and Meghan to then grab titles for their children with both hands and, erm, trotting them out for their own PR purposes.
(One option the Sussexes could have plumped for is to do what his uncle and aunt, Prince Edward and Sophie, the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh did for their kids, giving them the right to choose at age 18-years-old if they wanted to be styled as HRHs and the full royal honours available to them. In 2021, their daughter Lady Louise Windsor declined and
instead got a part-time job in a garden centre. Her brother James, Earl of Wessex will have to make his own call later this year.)
No matter, though, how much the Sussexes doth do their protesting about still being royal the UK disagrees. Last week a poll there found that the majority of Brits no longer think of Harry as actually royal and are far more likely to consider him a celebrity instead.
Interestingly, only days after Meghan and her ring were out in public, Harry joined in on some possible Windsor provoking. In Canada for the Games, he used a TV interview to say that he thinks that “one or two kids is probably enough” and that having five is too many.
That’s a line that probably did not go down particularly well in the Prince and Princess of Wales’ household (children: three) or with Princess Beatrice (who has three kidlets at home including step son Wolfie) or with Mike and Zara Tindall whose little ones number three.
Or even with the King and his…three siblings.
It’s not the first time either that Harry has made pretty much exactly this same point, having told legendary environmentalist Jane Goodall in 2019 that, of kids, he and Meghan would have “two, maximum”.
The man’s foot really does have a propensity to end up near his mouth, no?
I would not be doing my job if I didn’t point out something else here. I present to you, half- baked ham Prince Andrew and perma-hustling Sarah Ferguson, who are forever tawdrily wheeler dealer-ing, and who are, despite everything - the questionable deals and the court cases and drunkenly-offering-to-sell-access, still Duke and Duchess of York.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Originally published as Meghan trolls Charles with ‘loaded’ accessory choice
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